


Count on You

by miss_tatiana



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Spoilers, bart is living up to her killer angel moniker in this fic, because im not okay with the sdcc footage, but i had to do a bart-rescues-ken one, everyone is writing farah-and-todd-rescue-dirk-from-blackwing fics now which i absolutely love, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 06:37:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11618022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_tatiana/pseuds/miss_tatiana
Summary: Ken is almost used to life in that box, in that cab, with only Rapunzel for company, when something happens. Something he'd been thinking about for months but still something unexpected. A rescue.





	Count on You

**Author's Note:**

> ummm the ken sdcc footage fucked me up so here's a fix it. i love bart and ken so much

When the doors to the box they kept him in started to clunk, signifying that they were going to open, Ken sighed and wished he could go back to sleep. His hand throbbed from the IV - somehow he was sure that it wasn’t just giving him water and nutrients - and his head hurt as well. He marked off another day on the base of the steering wheel of the cab. The air in the box was so stale that whenever he took a breath, it felt like there was no actual oxygen in it. He was always dizzy, even when all he did was sit there and sleep and cry. And also sustain surely far too much electricity for a normal human. 

The dumbasses in the hazmat suits wouldn’t listen to him. They came in every day to ask him things they didn’t want the actual answers to. If they just brought in a lie detector or something - he was sure they had one of those - then they would finally figure out that he wasn’t whatever they thought he was. That he didn’t have powers.

He looked over at Rapunzel, sitting curled up in the passenger seat. Her head was rested on her front paws, and she looked almost as listless as Ken felt. If he was honestly, she was the only thing keeping him sane. He was so lucky to have something else, another living creature, in the cab with him. He reached over and rubbed between her ears. 

The doors finally swung slowly open, and Ken didn’t bother noting that it’d taken longer than usual because he was too busy trying to get himself ready to answer whatever they asked him. Questions that weren’t meant for someone like him. He didn’t even register that the person wasn’t wearing one of the stupid hazmat suits, occupied by flinching and waiting for a shock of electricity. 

“Ken?”

Ken looked up. That was a voice that it had taken him about twenty four hours to love, a voice that he’d been thinking about ever since he woke up in the box on the first day. His eyes filled with tears, he couldn’t help it. He was so happy to see someone he knew. “Bart,” he whispered. "I knew I wasn't crazy to- I knew I could count on you."

She looked different. She was wearing a set of impeccable, matching clothes, down to the shoes. It looked a little bit like a tae kwon do uniform, all white and blending into the walls of the box. Her face was clean, which was something he’d never really seen before, and he noticed that she had dimples, because she was grinning like crazy. And her hair was brushed. It was weird. Not bad, but definitely not her. 

“Ken, I like your beard but we shouldn't just waste time looking at each other,” Bart said sharply, blunt and to the point as always. “Yank that dumb tube out.” 

Ken tore his eyes away from her and looked down at the IV. Needles were the opposite of his thing, and the thought of pulling it out made him nervous. He untaped it and took a deep breath. He started pulling slowly, hoping that he was doing it right. Before he knew it, though, it was out, and blood was gathering where it had left. He pressed his shirttail to it. 

“Move over,” Bart grunted, getting her leg up over the door of the cab and through the open window. 

Ken scooted into the passenger seat, taking Rapunzel into his lap. “Why aren’t we getting out? Why are you- Bart?”

“We’ll just drive through the thing. The place.” She held up her fist, in which was the key. It, in contrast to her face and clothes, was dripping blood. 

“You held onto that the whole time?” Ken raised his eyebrows. He couldn’t believe it. She really was, in all honesty and under all circumstances, an angel. 

Bart nodded, jamming it into the ignition and turning it. “Some guys will probably show up… try to get us to stop, so I’m going to run them over. Okay?”

“Okay,” Ken repeated, his chest so full of happiness that it was hard to take a breath. He reached across her with one arm. 

Bart leaned her head on his shoulder and patted his forearm a little too hard. 

“No, no, I- I was-” Ken sat back in his seat, showing her the seat belt he’d been reaching for. “You don’t buckle on your own, so…” He clicked her seat belt. “But thank you for the hug, that was very… human- of you.” He smiled at her.

Bart sniffed. “I thought you were dead.”

“Aw, Bart,” Ken rested his head on top of Rapunzel’s. “I’m not gonna die if you still need me.”

“Good.” Bart nodded. “Okay, let’s go.” She floored the gas, as could be expected from her, and the cab rocketed from the box and into a much wider room. “So what happened to you? You hurt?” Bart yelled over the alarms that had just started up as she put the cab in gear. 

“Not now,” Ken yelled back. “They-” He stopped, holding Rapunzel tight to his chest and leaning down as Bart smashed the cab through the doors on the room. Now they were out in some sort of hallway, and the alarms were even louder. “They asked me stuff that I didn’t know how to answer, and shocked me.”

Bart’s face twisted up into what might’ve been even more rage than it already carried, and she jerked the steering wheel slamming the cab into several men standing in the hallway. “Why?” she shouted. 

“Because I wasn’t saying what they wanted me to be saying, you know?” Despite the fear he felt for his life as they barrelled down hallway after hallway, Ken was too happy to sincerely worry about his safety. He just held onto Rapunzel as tight as he could. 

“I’m gonna kill all those guys,” Bart yelled over the crashes around them. She plowed two more over who’d been standing in the path of the cab.

“But not now, right? We need to just get out,” Ken reminded her as they rounded a corner way too quickly. 

“Not right now,” Bart repeated, sounding a little dejected. 

“What about you?” shouted Ken. “What did they do to you?” The windows they were passing now weren’t looking into other rooms like they’d been moments before, but instead looking out into the sky. They must be close to an exit. 

Bart grabbed his shoulder and threw him down just as the windshield was shattered by a round of bullets. The men who’d shot them went under the wheels of the car just seconds later. “Lock me in a room,” she replied. “It was all white, it had got nothing in it, just walls.”

Ken tried to nudge pieces of the windshield of his back gingerly. One of them had sliced the back of his hand, and he wasn’t sure if he could lose any more blood and keep his consciousness. 

“They always talked to me, but I don’t know where their voices were coming from,” Bart shouted, trying to explain. She hung a sharp left, the hallways becoming less filled with fluorescent light and more filled with natural light as they went along, which was more than promising. “I got weird. Remember the hotel? When my spirit got floppy and I didn’t want to fight?”

Ken chuckled a little bit at her word choice, wind whipping through the open windows and where the windshield used to be and filling the cab. It felt so nice to breath fresh air again. “Yes, I remember.”

“I got like that,” Bart continued. “I didn’t want to do nothing all day, I just sat on the floor.” She pointed excitedly to a set of double doors up ahead. She was destroying the cab, but it didn’t matter. “And then one of the guys said they had you.”

Ken looked up. “They said that?” He flinched as a gunshot sounded behind them. 

“That made me get like me again,” Bart said, looking over at him for just a second before turning back to the hallway ahead of them. “Ken, you’re magic.”

“I think it was just you getting angry,” Ken replied, but he felt sappy and couldn’t stop smiling. He closed his eyes and held onto Rapunzel for dear life as they crashed through the set of doors, and even though his eyelids he could sense the change in light. The air tearing through the windshield gap and windows of the cab was colder and more fresh, and he could hear Bart whooping. They had made it out. “Bart!” he yelled, laughing. “We did it!”

Bart nodded, screaming, like she did when she was happy. She was back to her old self, that was for sure. 

Ken wiped the tear that had streaked down his face and into his beard. He was really free. He leaned his head back against the seat and let all the trauma that he’d gathered in that place blow away with the wind. 

After a while of silent happiness, Bart jabbed Ken’s arm. “You have our dog.”

“Yeah, I kept her,” Ken replied. “She was in the car with me the whole time.”

Bart reached over and poked Rapunzel’s paw. “Good job, Ken. Hey, what are these?” She was pointing now to the tally marks the steering wheel and dashboard had garnered over the days Ken was locked up. 

“It was to keep track of time, you know? Like a calendar?” Ken put his hand out the window, and he couldn’t remember feeling this wonderful in his whole life. 

“How long was it?” asked Bart. 

“Almost three months,” Ken replied, and the sheer amount of time that really was hit him. So much could have happened in the world and he never would have known. There could have been new wars started. His birthday had come and gone. The world had turned while he was in that box. He was that much more glad that he’d gotten out. “Bart, thank you for saving me.”

“That’s just one of the things I do now, I guess,” Bart answered nonchalantly, eyes on the road. But then she grabbed his hand and pressed it to her face, almost like a kiss, but not. 

Ken looked over at her as he took his hand back, eyes filling up with tears again. He was so lucky to know her, just to have her in his life. She was like an action hero plus a million, she was something that only she was. 

Bart spat on the floor of the car. “There was blood on that!”

“Yeah,” Ken murmured. “A bit of the windshield cut me.”

“Gross, Ken.”

“You look like you again, Bart,” Ken replied, nodding at her face, which was now half covered in blood. 

Bart grinned. “Thanks, Ken.”

Ken closed his eyes against the strong winds coming through all the open spaces of the cab, blocking out the pastoral road that seemed ill fit to lead to such an industrial, awful place. He was safe now. There wasn’t a safer place in the world to be than with Bart, Bart, who rescued him, who would probably keep rescuing him indefinitely. “No, thank  _ you _ , Bart.”

**Author's Note:**

> @ max landis- give!! them!!! a happy ending!!!!


End file.
